Introduction

As I begin to write this article, I do not know where my thoughts will
lead or what exactly it is that I want to say. I only know that the issue
that I shall address: briefly "What does one mean by the human person?",
has been bubbling about at the back of my mind for some time. It seems
to me that there is a deep-set and general confusion about what "person"
means and how the word should be used. I cannot help but wonder: first,
if this confusion betrays a deeper ontological uncertainty or ambivalence;
second, if it may have significant practical implications.

I shall begin by reviewing four sources of the meaning and significance
of the word and concept "person", then discuss the relationship between
the concepts of "mind" and "consciousness" and finally compare and contrast
two alternate hypothesese relating to personhood.

Drama

Originally, the word [persona: Latin] meant a theatrical mask or dramatic
role: a false or misleading front adopted by an actor to entertain an audience
and/or portray a hero or god. We now use the word script
in a similar way. Gay folk are often forced to adopt a heterosexual script
in order to conform to conventional society. Sometimes they do so so
very thoroughly that they almost forget their own reality and come
to live the role that they have had forced upon them.

Psychology

In secular usage, the phrase "the human person" is synonymous with "human
nature". So one might say that "sexuality is an important aspect of the
human person". The issue is further confused by the existence of the word
personality,
which is sometimes equated with person, as in "Socrates is a jolly
person" which means the same as "Socrates has a jolly personality".
If person and nature are radically different, then it is technically improper
to apply the adjective describing an aspect of nature (i.e. personality)
to the person.

Trinitarianism

In
connection with Trinitarian
doctrine: the three Divine Persons are equated with God's three
under-standings [sub-stancia: Latin, hypo-stasis: Greek] of HimSelves,
and contrasted with the single Being [Ousia:
Greek] that Is God. So while there are three initiations, three
causes, three beginnings, three purposes and three resolutions and endings:
three doIngs in God, all divine activity that Is initiated,
caused, purposed and resolved
Is
coherent and unitary.

The Tritheist heresy split the being
of God, constituting each hypostasis as a self-sufficient and independent
being-in-itself. The Sabellian
or Modalist heresy saw each person as a mask behind which God hid: representing
and revealing himself as he wished in one of three guises, as he acted
in the World. This amounts to the notion that the three persons are not
essential to God, but are only aspects of how he chooses to conduct his
relationship with created being. As I have explained elsewhere,
the Eastern Church; with its belief in the primacy of hypostasis, tended
to view the Western Church; with its belief in the primacy of being, as
Sabellian: just as the Western Church tended to suspect the East of Tritheism.

Incarnationalism

In connection with Incarnation
doctrine: the single Person of Jesus is said to unite two natures,
one Human and one Divine. Sometimes it is suggested that this unification
is that of joint
possession: so the Second Person of the UnDivided Trinity possesses
and acts through two natures, each of which is a mode of operation. Sometimes
it is suggested that the unification is that of synthesis or constitution:
so the two natures come together either as or to form One
Person, the God-Man Jesus Christ.

This
dichotomy mirrors the ambiguity of ontological precedence:

Which comes first, the person or the nature?

Does the person exist prior to, or at least independently, of the nature,
and

motivate,

activate,

drive or

give impetus to it?

Does the nature exist prior to the person, and generate or give rise to
it/him/her?

Is "person" just a synonym for a particular instance of a certain
kind of nature:

as in the apparent meaning of the phrase "Socrates is a man"?

The Monophysite
heresy (if it ever existed) saw the Unity of the Person of the Christ as
demanding that the two natures that came together in the incarnation be
themselves fused into a single "divinized humanity". Those christians that
accepted in full the analysis of the Synod
of Chalcedon construed that the finite humanity would be subsumed under,
consumed by and lost in any such fusion with the infinite divinity. The
Nestorian
heresy identified nature and person, such that each nature had to be
or at least have a person: hence the human person Jesus, the "Son
of Man" could not be "the Son of God"; the second person of the Trinity,
and the Blessed Virgin was not
the Mother of God the Son; but only
the Mother of Jesus: the Son of Man.

I shall now explore the two alternate extreme accounts: first that the
person is generated by or identical with the nature; second that the person
is independent from and possesses the nature.

Mind and Consciousness

I contend that "mind" and "consciousness" are not the same concept at all.
My
mind is an attribute of my nature, just as is my hand. I
use either to effect certain actions.

I grasp a hammer with my hand.

I grasp a concept with my mind.

My mind is no more me-myself-I[Joan
Armitrading] than is my foot or ear or eye or liver. My
self
is
my consciousness, my awareness: my
person.
I
am not my personality, which can change.
My person is an
invariant, more a point of reference on which everything else is hung,
certainly not a property of anything!

On the one hand, as a Platonist,I find the idea that I am (my
selfis) the abiding patterning (or
form) of my mind attractive: but what then of external violence (for
example brain trauma) that disrupts, distorts, corrupts or destroys that
patterning? On the other hand, I see no connection between such a patterning
and my internal, personal, experience of consciousness, which is the issue
at stake. To a degree I don't need to argue for the distinction between
consciousness and mind. It is well recognized that one is unconscious of
much of one's mental activity: hence the term "unconscious
mind". Although an account of consciousness that makes it a property
of part of the mind is formally possible, I am not interested in this:
because it makes no connection with my own experience
of consciousness.

I find it quite impossible to express what I mean by consciousness.
The best I can do is to try and elicit a reaction of recognition from anyone
that I discuss this matter with. It is all to do with words like
"I", "me", and "mine", somewhat related to the words "self", and
"aware" and to a still lesser extent "know" and "feel": for me, these last
words are suspiciously related more to Mind rather than Consciousness.
I suspect that a living and thinking being that was not conscious would
not have need of such words as these. The passive grammatical form would
always suffice, there being no awareness to hang a sense of causality
upon.

Sense
and Sensibility

It is one thing to sense something: to see or hear it. It is quite
another to be aware of it. A camera detects and forms a representation
of "what is out there", but it is not aware of what it senses and
records. Similarly a tape recorder. I doubt that the ant Nest is aware:
though it may be! The brain of a human being who has been rendered profoundly
unconscious by anaesthesia responds to external stimuli (such as a "click"
sounded in the ear), and this response can be measured by EEG equipment.
To misuse Plato's parable of the cave: whether or not there is a
conscious observer staring at the wall of the cave; the shadows of things
passing by the cave mouth still lie upon it - this is
knowledge
in the abstract
["Objective Knowledge" K.R. Popper].
Only if a conscious observer is present is there any awareness.

Awareness does not imply reaction or recognition and certainly is not
identifiable with either. Awareness is not behavioural. It can be
entirely passive: as in certain distressing medical conditions; or uncomprehending:
as in a new-born infant, and so not amenable to any interrogation or external
experimentation at all. It such situations it still exists, and is potentially
be of the most profound significance. Consider the case of someone paralysed
by a partially effective anaesthetic regime and then operated on. The fact
that there is no reaction to the surgery is of no consequence: the
only thing that matters is the agony undergone by the conscious
patient!

Note that I am not stressingself-consciousness
properly
so called in this discussion. I don't think this is important. Once
an entity is conscious, becoming conscious of its self is just a (fascinating)
technical matter of self-reference. Without a self to be conscious
of
and
a consciousness to be conscious with, one cannot be self-conscious.
However, "self" and "consciousness" adequately constitute the "self-consciousness":
nothing else is required.

It occurs to me that "the self" might be a good name for the model-idea
of the mind that the mind has of the mind: but I can't envisage how this
model idea is any more "aware" than any other.

I am What I am

The idea that my person is entirely derivative of my nature, is an attractive
hypothesis from the point of view of scientific method. It asserts that
two potentially different and diverse concepts are in fact one and the
same. This means that there is less to explain: that the world is a simpler
place than it might otherwise be. It therefore means that the account of
reality generated is easier to falsify. The difference between the ideas
that the person isan instance of a nature and that the person
is
generated by an instance of a nature is insignificant. If nature
necessarily results in person, then person is a characteristic of nature
and, at most, the distinction is one of abstraction.

Leaving aside the matter of consciousness, and self-consciousness, I
think the hypothesis "person and particular nature are interchangeable
concepts" could be an adequate basis for describing human reality.
My human nature comprises my living body and my mind (or intellectual soul).
On the current hypothesis, I - my person - is identical with my nature,
hence I can say "I am body and soul", or better "I am an ensouled
body". Similarly "Jesus
is both human: body and soul; and divine."

The computer hardware/software analogy

Computer hardware supports software. Though they are different kinds of
thing, the software is nothing more than a certain behaviour of
the hardware. Certainly, this behaviour has a significance which
can only be appreciated, interpreted and understood in a wider context.
Nevertheless, whether the behaviour is understood or not by an external
observer; it remains, so far as the computer is concerned, programmed activity.
The computer hardware neither specifies nor gives rise to any particular
software, but is open to external definition. In other words, it can be
possessed
by any number of demons, processes or programs. Moreover, the software
is transferable from one computer to another without any loss of identity.
Nevertheless, the software has no independent subsistence. It is utterly
dependent on the hardware for its existence, which is nothing more
than a certain behaviour of the hardware.

My conscious mind is comparable to a piece of "user application"
software running on a computer. My sub-conscious mind is comparable to
the "operating system" that supports the application software. A major
difference between mind and conventional software is that mental algorithms
(both conscious and unconscious) are adaptive and self modifying. We do
not learn just by accumulating data, but more significantly by letting
experience modulate our mental processes themselves. I don't think that
our conscious minds are a single process (in a unix sense), but many complementary,
competing and interacting processes. Sometimes, as when we fall
in love; or suffer from certain (other ?) mental disorders, one processes
comes to dominate our minds, and we become obsessed or captivated by a
pathological compulsion or delusion.

Conscious and Unconscious

It is instructive to note that as soon as I "left aside the matter of consciousness",
I reintroduced it (at least by name) as the demarcation between the two
parts of the human mind: the conscious and unconscious. It
is difficult to understand how application software: the conscious mind,
differs significantly from system software: the unconscious mind. In principle,
the former might consist of nothing more than organizations of the latter:
lots of "system calls".

Mind, Models and Ideas

Our immediate awareness is of "ideas". We are not conscious of how these
ideas arise or evolve, except that we have ideas about how they might do
so. We are conscious of the fact (have the idea) that "one plus one is
two", but have no awareness of how we "have ideas" in the first
place. Ideas are themselves largely self-contained (though contextual)
subjective or internal models of objective or external reality. Ideas are
bits of mind. The mind is nothing other than interacting aggregates of
ideas.

This suggests a demarcation between the conscious and unconscious mind.
The conscious mind is the set of currently active models of external reality;
the unconscious mind is the set of inactive models (awaiting trigger by
some interrupt condition) plus the support soft- and firm-ware that
services and regulates them. These system utilities are not about
objective reality, though they are indispensable as a support and basis
for modelling it. They are, as it were, the mataphysics behind the physics.

Unfortunately, this demarcation is obviously false. In order to ride
a bicycle, one develops a "balancing by steering" model. At first one is
conscious of making use of the model, but it rapidly fades into the unconscious,
even while it is being called upon! Perhaps a better demarcation would
be on the basis not of activity but of malleability. The consciousness
mind would then consist of those active models of external reality that
are presently open to revision. Consciousness would then be coextensive
with mental revision and adaptation: what we normally call "learning".

Sleep

In slumber, no models are active in the sense that they are being used
either to predict or organize and interpret external sense stimuli. Hence
a sleeper is unconscious, by definition. I suppose that in dreams, some
ideas are active in the improper sense that the models are being
put through their paces: being tested for distinguishably pathological
behaviour and corrections applied if such is detected. This, then would
be how nightmares arise and suggests why
they are so frightening: a nightmare is an incipient instability or
other pathology in one of our models of reality. This is why sleep
is so important: without it ideas can mutate dangerously without opportunity
for correction. Simply put, sleep deprivation drives one mad. Amusingly,
I write this after a very bad night's sleep.

Personality

On this account of reality, my personality is the characteristic behaviour
of the set of ideas (mental models of external reality) that makes up my
mind. It is rather like the impulse response (or Green's) function of a
linear system. Of course, being a highly non-linear system, the mind cannot
have anything like an "impulse response" properly speaking. Nevertheless,
someone is kind or cruel; generous or mean; imaginative or legalistic,
as the balance of their judgement tends to favour certain outcomes. So,
if it is my "nature always to have mercy", then my personality:
the habit or bias of my mind, is part of my nature.

What
I am is not Who I am

The alternative view is less tidy, but its untidiness makes it richer and
more open to the spiritual. It attempts to distinguish between who
and what I am. On this account, while in one sense Socrates
was male; Greek; wise and homosexual: in another he was none of
these. These are all characteristics of the specific human nature
that he possessed and graced the world with. They are what he was,
not who he was. As the hemlock that the Athenian Democrats forced
him to drink deadened first his body and then his mind and finally killed
him altogether, as his noble personality guttered and died: he was no less
(the hypostasis) Socrates, though he was no longer the person (in
the informal sense) that he once was. That person: his specific
human nature, was the sum total of his virtue and activity. It was extinguished
as he died. The person (hypostasis) Socrates: the subject who loved and
was loved and then betrayed; who believed and was believed, was not changed
by the poison that he drank, neither was he diminished by death: though
in death he lost the human faculties of action.

There are two different interpretations to be put on what I have just
said:

On the one hand, it is compatible with the gloss that the person is the
particularizing
form that distinguishes one instance of human nature from any other.

The actual man Socrates was only ever an imperfect instantiation of this
"idea in the mind of God".

As he grew old and then died, this participation
variously waxed, waned and then ceased.

Nevertheless, theform of
Socrates: his spirit, the person whom Plato revered, was and is immortal.

This view is attractive, but has the following problems:

It suggests that more than one human being might participate in
the same person, even in the same space-time neighbourhood.

While this might be taken to explain the concept of "soul
mates", it tends to derogate from the uniqueness of the individual: evenidentical
twins are independent and unique persons.

The unique and characteristic participation in many independent forms that
is proper to any subject is adequate to particularize it: the supposition
of a single particularizing form is superfluous.

While it does not explain consciousness, it does suggest that identical
twins would share a single consciousness: which they don't!

On the other hand, the person can be taken to be the consciousness and/or
self-identity.

This view no more explains consciousness than the former, but at least
it affords it a place to be.

Moreover, it makes clear the uniqueness of each individual, which lies
in the singular and distinct point of view of each subject.

Dualism

It is important to note that I am not saying that the person (the spiritual
hypostasis: either consciousness or particularizing form) is important
while the personality (persona: the mental part of a particular material
nature) is unimportant. Nor that the former is prior and the latter subservient.
Platonists are often accused of "dualism": for idealizing the spiritual
and decrying the material. Such is not my intention. It should be clear
that all of the activity attributable to Socrates is activity of
his nature: that all those characteristics of Socrates that endear
him to us are characteristics of his nature. Socrates is a good and nobel
person
only because he has a good and nobel nature. As hypostasis he is
mere potentiality: only when united to the nature proper to himself does
he become actual to us.

It might even seem that the person is a cypher: all that we know of
someone is an impression of their nature, their personality. Their inner
spiritual identity is forever hidden from us. Nevertheless, it is vital
to Socrates that he is who he is as well as what
he is. If he were not aware, he could not will and so direct
his nature to act - in accordance with its intrinsic characteristics.

Awareness and Will

The crux of identity is (self-)awareness and (free) choice. The mind/personality/will
mediates the world to the self and the self to the world. In both directions
it imposes its own bias or spin on the impetus it is given. We see the
world in terms of edges of objects because our retinas and optical cortex
are preconfigured to detect and emphasize (straight) lines. We perceive
faces in arrangements of shapes because we are especially interested in
faces and pre-disposed to see them even where they do not objectively exist.
Similarly, we hear rhythms because our ears hunt them out in preference
to random sequences. We interpret the words and actions of others in terms
of our past experiences: projecting motivations and extrapolating outcomes.

When we decide to act, our decisions are flavoured
by the relative importance and detailed significance we give to various
factors: our personal security; the pleasure or pain anticipated; the long
term effect on inter-personal relationships and so on. This is where our
choices are either well ordered or disordered. Our decisions are also affected
by other mental characteristics or habits (vices and virtues) like impetuosity,
compassion, complacency, trust, cynicism or credulity. As we act, our actions
are limited by our capabilities: for example, our propensity to fumble;
stutter; forget a minus sign, guess, imagine and inspire.

The importance of the personality is in the successfulness of this two
way mediation between the object (external reality) and the subject (internal
reality). Both realities are in a sense more important than the intermediary
that allows them to communicate, but (quite apart from the fact that for
another person, Socrates' personality is a part of external, objective,
reality) the personality or mind is in a sense just as important. This
is first because without it there can be no representation of the Object,
and second because it is the only means by which the Subject can act. Without
his nature and personality, Socrates is no-thing; without his person Socrates
is no-one.

Which is the most important:the pipe, the air,or the melody that is the dance of windabout the flute's lip?

Person, Soul and Spirit

Soul is another problematic word. The soul is said to be immortal: so it
would seem to be the self-identity or person; yet Jesus is said to have
a human soul, but be a divine person: not a human being at
all. This suggest that the soul is equivalent to the mind and will, which
I do not believe to be any more immortal than the body. Moreover, according
to the schoolmen, all living creatures have souls. These are the principles
of their life, their Aristotelian substances: yet except for human beings,
they also teach that all living creatures have material souls. Only
the human soul is supposed to be spiritual and so immortal.
Finally, the Church teaches that each individual human being is infused
with a human soul, specially created by God, "para
phusin", quite apart from the biological procreative process.

Soul and Mind

I suggest that soul should, generally speaking, be understood as synonymous
with mind in its widest sense: the brain processes that constitute our
reason, conscience, will and memory. This allows one to say both that Jesus
had a human soul and that all living creatures have souls. It also
means that all souls are material. They are nothing other than the
coherent and significant behaviour of neural systems: but note the word
significant.
The soul-behaviour is not adequately interpretable apart from its context
and purpose or finality.
The human soul can, inaccurately, be described as spiritualin
as far as it is associated with and somehow linked to the conscious
human person or spirit.

"'Into thy
hands I commend my spirit' [Ps 30:5],
etc. The soul he treats as an opponent. As for the body, the saints made
little account of it. Fearing to be wounded by deceivers he commends his
spirit to God, speaking of His providential powers as His 'hands.' The
Saviour too, when nailed to the cross, made use of this saying. Spirit
is a term Scripture sometimes uses for the mind; as when insisting that
a virgin should be holy, 'in spirit and in
body' [1Cor 7:34].
Sometimes it employs the term for the soul or life, for instance in James,
'As
the body apart from the spirit is dead'
[Jas
2:26]. And
sometimes for the consciousness
which is associated with life, as in the words, 'No
one knoweth the things of a man save the spirit that dwelleth in him' [1Cor
2:11]. The passage before us may be understood
in the three senses. He speaks of having been ransomed by God from his
enemies as though he had been taken captive."[Origen: "Selections from the Psalms",
in "Selections from the Commentaries and Homilies of Origen"Tr R.B. Tollinton, p 126-7]

What difference does
the spirit make?

The question then arises: "What behaviour, if any, can be attributed to
the influence of the spiritual consciousness, hypostasis or person
on the
material mind-soul?" If no specific and testable answer can
be given, it would seem that the notion of a spiritual consciousness is
redundant. However, it may be that the point of view of the conscious individual
is hopelessly clouded. For Socrates, volition and consciousness are so
central to and confused with the material activity of his mind-soul that
it may be impossible for him to discern where one starts and the other
stops, or better how they merge and interact.

The following unsatisfactory trivial response
can be made: "The influence of the spiritual consciousness on the mind
is manifested by the inordinate amount of philosophical writing (such as
this very document) concerning its very self!" If people were not conscious,
or if their consciousnesses could not affect their behaviour, they wouldn't
spend any time debating what it means to be conscious!

A return to self-consciousness

Earlier in this essay,
I dismissed self-conciousness as not very important. This was because I
took it to mean exactly what its name might give one to think it meant:
the consciousness of the self of itself. In fact this is not really what
it means. When it is realised what self-consciousness truly is, it becomes
altogether more significant.

All that the self is directly conciouss of is its own mind. If it is
conscious of anything else, this is a mediated consciousness at best; the
self is only directly aware of mental representations and models of reality.
Now, if a subject is truely self-concious (as opposed to merely cognescent
of the fact that it has a mind, which is not at all the same thing) then
the mind must contain some (very limited and inadequate) model or representation
of the consciousness. If the origin of this model is the same as that of
all other ideas: a need to explain, account for and predict certain identifiable
phenomena, then the fact that a subject is self-conscious corroborates
the hypothesis that their consciousness or spirit is a cause of mental
events. Hence, self-consciousness (or a profession of self-consciousness)
is itself indicative of the existence of the spirit.

How does the spirit affect
the soul?

Although this is all true, it is not enough. The questions: "How does the
consciousness come to influence behaviour?" and "What matters
other
than debate about itself does the consciousness or person affect?"
arise. One can presume that the answer to the second is "Almost everything",
and I suggest that the answer to the former is "By biasing the decision
making mechanism that is already part of the material mind by providing
a spiritual input alongside material sense data". Still this is unsatisfactory.

What has the spiritual-consciousness got to bring to the party?

What is its motivation in wishing to weight the mental process in favour
of one outcome rather than another?

Why is this motivation not simply (part of) the self-referential and evolving
moral metric?

What purpose is to be gained from segregating part (and one would presume
a most significant part) of the intellect and will from the material mind?

The co-processor analogy.

Perhaps the issue is one of magnitude. It may be true that the human brain-mind
is capable in principle of all the kinds of behaviour characteristic of
human beings, but not of the level of sophistication that in fact human
beings attain. In this case the "spritual soul" would be analogous to a
"co-processor" in a computer, which does the arithmetically intensive calculations;
leaving the physical mind, to handle the problem of interfacing with
the body.

I don't like this hypothesis. It strikes me as rather baroque and artificial.
It introduces a physical/spiritual redundancy or duplication that I find
aesthetically displeasing. Obviously, my personal likes and dislikes are
not proper grounds for dismissing this hypothesis! It does, after all,
have the virtue of being somewhat testable. Assuming that the higher primates
do not have spiritual souls (which I acknowledge is an unwarranted assumption)
it tends to follow that the level of sophistication of their thought processes
and ethics should be hugely below that of human beings: quite out of proportion
with the difference in brain complexity. Personally, I doubt that this
is true, and I therefore tend to the conclusion that either the higher
primates also have spiritual souls or that the "spiritual soul" does not
act as a co-processor for the brain.

The programmer analogy.

This picture can be turned on its head. Instead of seeing the "spirtual-soul"
as a helper for the "brain-mind", it can be conceived of as its "applications
programmer" or "user". In this view, the spirit is the source of questions
and ultimate significance, setting, guiding and modifying the priorities
and objectives of the mind. It makes the most high-level judgements and
decisions, leaving lower-level and habitual questions to the "brain-mind"
proper; which it has already programmed and adjusted to suit its common-place
needs. This account is fine as far as it goes, my only problem with it
is that as I write it I am more convinced that I am decribing the demarcation
between the higher functions of the cerebral cortex and the lower functions
of more primitive parts of the brain.

Emergence

A more satisfactory solution would be along the lines that the consciousness
emerged from the self-referential mental process. I do not believe that
this would involve any derogation from ethical autonomy or loss of free-will.

"Spirit is awareness, intelligence, recollection.
It requires no dogmas, as does animal faith or the art of living. Human
morality, for the spirit, is but the inevitable and hygienic bias of one
race of animals. Spirit itself is not human; it may spring up in any life;
it may detach itself from any provincialism; as it exists in all nations
and religions, so it may exist in all animals, and who knows in how many
undreamt of beings, and in the midst of what worlds? It might flourish,
as the Stoics felt, even in the face of chaos, except that chaos could
not sustain the animal life, the psyche, which spirit requires for its
organ. From the existence of spirit a psychologist may therefore argue
back to the existence - at least local and temporary - of some cosmos of
organized matter: but this dependence of mind on body is a lesson taught
by natural philosophy, when natural philosophy is sound; it is not a free
or evident requirement of spirit in its first deliverance. On the contrary,
the body which is the matrix and cradle of spirit in time, seems a stumbling-block
to it in its spontaneous career; and a rather long discipline and much
chastening hardly persuade this supernatural nurseling that it is really
so domestic, and that it borrows its existence from a poor, busy, precarious
animal life; or that the natural rhythms, pauses, and synthetic reactions
of that life are the ground of its native affinity with the eternal."
[George Santayana: "Platonism and the Spiritual Life"]

However, for the life of me, I cannot see how this allows for my acute
experience of actually being conscious!
It seems to me that there is an ontological leap from the concept of mind
to that of consciousness or spirit. Unlike the gap that used to exist in
our perception between animate and inanimate matter, this is not one
that can be at all described in terms of behaviour. The "characteristics
of life" that I was taught in high school: "movement, reproduction, respiration,
nutrition, excretion" are all phenomenologies. This list is a basis on
which a definition, account and understanding of what
Life is can be erected. A similar list might be concocted to represent
the "characteristics of mind" (I shall refrain), and again, an account
can be set out of what Mind is.
In contrast, I suggest that no such list exists for consciousness. The
characteristic of the consciousness is to be conscious: that is all. This
is no help whatever as a guide as to how a theory of consciousness might
be put together.

The typical worker in this field tends to ignore this disjuncture and
simply treat of "the problem of mind". They presume, without question or
justification, that if this was completely solved, then so would be the
mystery of the human person. I sympathize with this response to what
I perceive to be a daunting problem, but I do not accept that it is wise.
Moreover, I suspect that it is both harmful to the ethical character of
work undertaken on this basis and will tend to hinder technical progress
in the field.

The memory and the self.

It is impossible to conceive of self-consciousness in the absence of memory.
For me to have an idea of my self, it is necessary to know that
this self is a persistent entity, else as soon as I had grasped that "I
am", the "am" would have become "was" and be forgotten. To an extent, my
idea of myself is caught up in the memories that I have of my
life story. I know that "that was me, back then" because I remember
those things happening to me. Nevertheless, I am not my memory,
still less my memories of me. The fact that memory is necessary for me
to
know that I am does not imply that it is necessary for me to be
who I am. My consciousness is somehow sequential and only exists in
the present (whatever that is!) my memory only serves to corroborate my
self-identity by bringing the past to bear on the present: making records
of past events part of present reality.

Consciousness has got something to do with time. Indeed. it is the origin
of the concept of "now". Without an observer, all times are equivalent
in a Relativistic
Minkowskian Block Universe. Unfortunately, this observation doesn't
help us. Time is almost as mysterious a concept as consciousness! Perhaps
when Physics provides us with a better understanding of what time
is and why it seems to flow, we will be in a better state to understand
our own conscious understandings. On the other hand, it is possible that
it will be an advance in metaphysics that will give the clue to how we
should account for time.

Consciousness is all to do with observation. Whether one accepts or
rejects the Copenhaganist
view of Quantum
Mechanics (in which reality is not objective but depends crucially
on the observer), it remains true
that awareness requires a conscious knower. Truth requires a Subject
that learnS, as well as an Object that is learned Of,
but even truth: correspondence between idea and reality, is not right opinion
(ortho-doxy) unless the subject is some-one, not some-thing,
and so can hold an opinion.

Gender Issues

It is a moot question as to whether gender is associated with the person
or the nature. I am quite happy to say that "I am male", but doubt that
this is a constitutive statement about myself. I rather suspect that my
maleness is not much more significant than the fact that I am right-handed.
On the other hand, one must listen to the testimony of those who identify
as transgendered. I understand such people to say that they distinctly
perceive themselves to be of one gender emotionally, psychologically and/or
mentally while knowing themselves to be physiologically the other gender.
Clearly, this establishes the fact that there are at least two levels at
which the concept of gender applies. One is certainly the physiological:
what primary and secondary sexual characteristics does the body of this
person
posses? The other might be at the level of the conscious person. This would
make gender a spiritual issue and would offer a potential justification
for the Church's present teaching on the impossibility of the ordination
of women. On the other hand, there is no need to adopt this hypothesis.
It is sufficient, it seems to me, to hypothesize that self-identification
as male or female occurs as part of the mental process. As a gay
man, I am convinced that this is where my sexual orientation lies. I do
no believe that my sexuality is determinant of me as a person, it is just
a very important part of my personality: my nature. To what extent
gender identification and sexual orientation are genetic and/or environmental
is immaterial, once established they are substantially
immutable.